Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama by Walter W. Greg

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The three pastoral elegies of William Basse, published in 1602, the last
work of the kind to appear in Elizabeth's reign, form in reality a short
pastoral romance. The court-bred Anander falls in love with the
shepherdess Muridella, and charges the sheep-boy Anetor to convey to her
the knowledge of his passion. His love proving unkind he turns shepherd,
and resolves to remain so until his suit obtains better grace. More than
half a century later, namely in 1653, Basse prepared for press a
manuscript containing a series of pastorals headed 'Clio, or The first
Muse in 9 Eglogues in honor of 9 vertues,' and arranged according to the
days of the week. The whole composition is singularly lacking alike in
interest and merit.[117]

It is not surprising to find the eclogues of the early years of James'
reign reflecting current events. In 1603 appeared a curious compilation,
the work of Henry Chettle, bearing the title: 'Englandes Mourning Garment:
Worne here by plaine Shepheardes; in memorie of their sacred Mistresse,
Elizabeth, Queene of Vertue while shee lived, and Theame of Sorrow, being
dead. To which is added the true manner of her Emperiall Funerall. After
which foloweth the Shepheards Spring-Song, for entertainement of King
James our most potent Soveraigne. Dedicated to all that loved the deceased
Queene, and honor the living King.' The book is a strange medley of verse
and prose, elegies on Elizabeth in the form of eclogues, and political
lectures written in the style of the pastoral romance. The most
interesting passage is an address to contemporary poets reproaching them
for their neglect of the praises of the late queen. The pastoral names
under which they are introduced appear to be merely nonce appellations,
but are worth recording as they refer to a set outside the usual pastoral
circle. Thus Corin is Chapman; Musaeus, of course Marlowe; English Horace,
no doubt Jonson; Melicert, Shakespeare; Coridon, Drayton; Anti-Horace,
most likely Dekker, and Moelibee, mentioned with him, possibly Marston. To
Musidore, 'Hewres last Musaeus' (no doubt corrupt), and the 'infant muse,'
it is more difficult to assign an identity.[118] Throughout Chettle
assumes to himself Spenser's pastoral title.

To the same or the following year belong the twelve eclogues by Edward
Fairfax, the translater of Tasso's _Gerusalemme_, which are now for the
most part lost. One, the fourth, was printed in 1737 from the original
manuscript, another in 1883 from a later transcript in the Bodleian, while
a third is preserved in a fragmentary state in the British Museum.[119]
All three deal chiefly with contemporary affairs, the two former being
concerned with the abuses of the church, while the last is a panegyric of
the 'present age,' and especially of English maritime adventure. This is
certainly the most pleasing of the three, though the style is at times
pretentious and over-charged with far-fetched allusions. There are,
however, fine passages, as for instance the lines on Drake:

And yet some say that from the Ocean maine,
He will returne when Arthur comes againe.

More directly concerned with the political events of the day is the
curious eclogue [Greek: Da/phnis Polyste/phanos] by Sir George Buc,
published in 1605, in praise of the Genest crown, the royal right by
Apollo's divine decree of a long line of English kings, who are passed
in review by way of introduction to the praises of their latest
representative. The work was revised by an unknown hand for the accession
of Charles, and republished under the title of _The Great Plantagenet_ in
1635, as by 'Geo. Buck, Gent.' Sir George held the post of Master of the
Revels from 1608 to 1622, and died the following year.

In 1607 appeared a poem 'Mirrha the Mother of Adonis,' by William
Barksted, to which were appended three eclogues by Lewes Machin.[120] Of
these, one describes the love of a shepherd and his nymph, while the other
two treat the theme of Apollo and Hyacinth. Composed in easy verse of no
particular distinction these poems belong to that borderland between the
idyllic and the salacious on which certain shepherd-poets loved to dally.

The years 1614 and 1615 saw the appearance of works of considerably
greater interest from every point of view, among others from that of what
I have described as pastoral freemasonry. In the former year there
appeared a small octavo volume entitled _The Shepherd's Pipe_. The chief
contributor was William Browne of Tavistock, the first book of whose
pastoral epic, _Britannia's Pastorals_, had appeared the previous year.
Besides seven eclogues from his pen, the volume contained one by
Christopher Brooke, one by Sir John Davies, and two by George Wither.
These last two were republished in 1615, with three additional pieces, in
Wither's collection entitled _The Shepherd's Hunting_. With the exception
of one or two of Browne's, these fourteen eclogues all deal with the
personal relation of the friends who disguise themselves respectively,
Browne as Willy, Wither as Roget (a name later exchanged for that of
Philarete), Brooke as Cuddie, and Davies as Wernock. Wither's were
written, as we learn from the title-page of the 1615 volume, while the
author was in prison in the Marshalsea for hunting vice with a pack of
satires in full cry, that is, the _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ of 1611. The
verse seldom rises above an amiable mediocrity, the best that can be said
for it being that it carries on, in a not wholly unworthy manner, the
dainty tradition of the octosyllabic couplet between the _Faithful
Shepherdess_ and Milton's early poems. Browne's eclogues are chiefly
remarkable for the introduction into the first of a long and rather
tedious tale derived from a manuscript of Thomas Occleve's. The last of
the series, an elegy on the death of Thomas, son of Sir Peter Manwood, has
been quoted as the model of _Lycidas_, but the resemblance begins and ends
with the fact that in either case the subject of the poem met his death by
drowning--a resemblance which will scarcely support a charge of
plagiarism[121].

In 1621 appeared six eclogues under the title of _The Shepherd's Tales_ by
the prolific miscellaneous writer Richard Brathwaite. Each in its turn
recounts the amorous misfortunes of some swain, which usually arise out of
the inconstancy of his sweetheart, and the prize of infelicity having been
adjudged, the author, not perhaps without a touch of malice, sends the
whole company off to a wedding. The _Tales_ are noteworthy for the very
pronounced dramatic gift they reveal, being in this respect quite unique
in their kind. The same year saw the publication of the not very
successful expansion of one of these eclogues into the pastoral narrative
in verse, entitled 'Omphale or the Inconstant Shepherdesse.' Brathwaite
had already in 1614 published the _Poet's Willow_, containing a
'Pastorall' which recounts the unsuccessful love of Berillus, an Arcadian
shepherd, for the nymph Eliza[122].

Pursuing the chronological order we come next to Phineas Fletcher's
'Piscatorie Eclogs' appended to his _Purple Island_ in 1633. Except that
the scene is laid on the banks of a river instead of in the pastures, and
that the characters spend their time looking after boats and nets instead
of tending flocks, they differ in nought from the strictly pastoral
compositions. They are seven in number, and deal either with personal
subjects or with conventional themes. As an imitation of the _Shepherd's
Calender_, without its uncouthness whether of subject or language, and
equally without its originality or higher poetic value, the work is not
wanting in merit, but it is most decidedly wanting in all power to arrest
the reader's attention.

The last collection that will claim our notice is that of Francis Quarles,
which appeared posthumously in 1646 under the title of 'The Shepheards
Oracles: Delivered in Certain Eglogues[123]. The interest of the volume
lies not so much in its poetic merit, which however is considerable, as in
the fact that it deals with almost every form of religious controversy at
a critical point in English history. Quarles was a stanch Anglican, and he
lashes Romanists and Precisians with impartial severity. One of the
eclogues opens with a panegyric on Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of
which a messenger enters bearing the news of his death, thus fixing the
date of the poem in all probability in the winter of 1632-3. In the
eleventh and last the Puritan party is mercilessly satirized in the person
of Anarchus, in allusion to the supposed socialistic tendency of its
teaching. He is thus described in a dialogue between Philarchus and
Philorthus (the lovers of order and justice presumably):

_Philor._ How like a Meteor made of zeal and flame
The man appears!

_Philar._ Or like a blazing Star
Portending change of State, or some sad War,
Or death of some good Prince.

_Philor._ He is the trouble
Of three sad Kingdoms.

_Philar._ Even the very Bubble,
The froth of troubled waters.

_Philor._ Hee's a Page
Fill'd with Errata's of the present Age.

_Philar._ The Churches Scourge--

_Philor._ The devils _Enchiridion_--

_Philar._ The Squib, the _Ignis fatuus_ of Religion.

To their address Anarchus replies in a song which it would be easy to
illustrate from the dramatic literature of the time, and which well
indicates the estimation in which the faction was popularly held. Here is
one verse:

Wee'l down with all the Varsities,
Where Learning is profest,
Because they practise and maintain
The Language of the Beast:
Wee'l drive the Doctors out of doores,
And Arts what ere they be,
Wee'l cry both Arts, and Learning down,
And, hey! then up goe we.

The whole song for sheer rollicking hypocrisy is without parallel in the
language. The date of the poem is doubtful, but Quarles lived till 1644,
and after two years of civil strife the terms which the interlocutors in
the above passage apply to the Puritan party can hardly be regarded as
prophetic.

Besides the works we have examined above, several others are known to have
existed, though they are not now traceable. Thus 'The sweete sobbes, and
amorous Complaintes of Shepardes and Nymphes in a fancye confusde by An
Munday' was entered on the books of the Stationers' Company on August 19,
1583. Two years earlier, on August 3, 1581, had been entered 'A Shadowe of
Sannazar.' Again we know, alike from Wood's _Athenae_ and Meres' _Palladis
Tamia_, that Stephen Gosson left works of the kind of which we have now no
trace; while Puttenham in his _Art of English Poesy_ mentions an eclogue
of his own, addressed to Edward VI, and entitled _Elpine_. Puttenham and
Meres in dealing with pastoral writers also mention one Challener, no
doubt the Thomas Chaloner who contributed to the _Mirror for Magistrates_,
and Nashe in his preface to _Menaphon_ adds Thomas Atchelow, who may be
plausibly identified with the Thomas Achelly who contributed verses to
Watson's _Hecatompathia_ and various sententious fragments to _England's
Parnassus_, among them a not very happy rendering of those lines of
Catullus which might almost be taken as a motto to pastoral poetry as a
whole:

The sun doth set, and brings again the day,
But when our light is gone, we sleep for aye.

V

It is not easy to arrange the mass of occasional lyric verse of a pastoral
nature in a manner to facilitate a general survey. We may perhaps divide
it roughly into general groups which possess certain points in common and
can be treated more or less independently. Little would be gained by
following a strictly chronological order, even were it possible to do so.

We occasionally meet with translations, though from the nature of the case
these, as well as evidences of direct foreign influence, are less
prominent here than in the more formal type of pastoral verse. We have
already seen that Googe, besides borrowing from Garcilaso's version of a
portion of the _Arcadia_, himself paraphrased passages of the _Diana_ in
his eclogues, and the latter work also supplied material for the pen of
Sir Philip Sidney. His debt consists in translations of two songs from
Montemayor's romance, printed among his miscellaneous poems[124]. About a
dozen translations from the same source appeared in _England's Helicon_,
the work of Bartholomew Yong. They are for the most part very inferior to
the general average of the collection, but the opening of one at least is
worth quoting:

'Guardami las vaccas,
Carillo, por tu fe.--
Besami primero,
Yo te las guardare.'

I prithee keep my kine for me,
Carillo, wilt thou? tell.--
First let me have a kiss of thee,
And I will keep them well.

Another translation is the poem headed 'A Pastorall' in Daniel's _Delia_
of 1592, a rendering of the famous chorus to the first act of Tasso's
_Aminta_.

When we turn to original verse, the first group of poets to arrest our
attention is the court circle which gathered round Sir Philip Sidney.
There is a poem by his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, preserved in
Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_, and there headed 'A Dialogue between two
Shepherds, Thenot and Piers, in Praise of Astrea.' It was composed for the
entertainment of the queen, and was no doubt sung or recited in character.
Such was likewise the mode of production of Sir Philip's 'Dialogue between
two Shepherds, uttered in a pastoral show at Wilton,'[125] which is more
rustic in character. _Astrophel and Stella_ supplies a graceful 'complaint
to his flock' against the cruelty of

Stella, fiercest shepherdess,
Fiercest, but yet fairest ever;
Stella, whom the heavens still bless,
Though against me she persever.
Though I bliss inherit never.

The _Poetical Rhapsody_ again preserves two others, the outcome of
Sidney's friendship with Greville and Dyer. The first is a song of
welcome; the second, headed 'Dispraise of a Courtly Life,' ends with the
prayer:

Only for my two loves' sake,
In whose love I pleasure take;
Only two do me delight
With the ever-pleasing sight;
Of all men to thee retaining,
Grant me with these two remaining.

Of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, the loyal admirer and biographer of
Sidney, who desired on his tomb no better passport to posterity than that
he had been Sir Philip's friend, we have among other works published in
1633 a series of so-called sonnets recording his love for the fair
Caelica. There is a thin veil of pastoralism over the whole, with here and
there a more definite note as in 'Sonnet' 75, a poem of over two hundred
lines lamenting his lady's cruelty--

Shepheardesses, yet marke well
The Martyrdome of Philocell.

Of Sir Edward Dyer's works no early edition was published. Such isolated
poems as have survived were collected by Grosart in 1872 from a variety of
sources. If the piece entitled _Cynthia_ is authentic, it gives him a
respectable place beside Greville among the minor pastoralists of his day.
Lastly, in connexion with Sidney we may note a curious poem which appeared
in the first edition of the _Arcadia_ only.[126] It is a 'bantering'
eclogue, in which the shepherds Nico and Pas first abuse one another and
then fall to a comic singing match. It is evidently suggested by the fifth
Idyl of Theocritus, and is a fair specimen of a very uncommon class in
English. Akin to this is the burlesque variety, of which we have already
met with examples in Lorenzo's _Nencia_ and Pulci's _Beca_, and which is
almost equally rare with us. A specimen will be found in the not very
successful eclogue in Greene's _Menaphon_. The following is as near as the
author was able to approach to Lorenzo's delicately playful tone:

Carmela deare, even as the golden ball
That Venus got, such are thy goodly eyes:
When cherries juice is jumbled therewithall,
Thy breath is like the steeme of apple pies.

It would, of course, be grossly unfair to judge Robert Greene, the
ever-sinning and ever-repentant, by the above injudicious experiment. His
lyrical powers appear in a very different light, for instance, in the
'Palmer's Ode' in _Never Too Late_ (1590), one of the most charming of his
many confessions:

As I lay and kept my sheepe,
Came the God that hateth sleepe,
Clad in armour all of fire,
Hand in hand with Queene Desire,
And with a dart that wounded nie,
Pearst my heart as I did lie,
That, when I wooke, I gan sweare
Phillis beautie palme did beare.

From the same romance I must do Greene the justice of quoting the
delightful, though but remotely pastoral, song of every loving nymph to her
bashful swain:

Sweet Adon, darest not glance thine eye--
N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?--
Upon thy Venus that must die?
Je vous en prie, pity me:
N'oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel--
N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?

See how sad thy Venus lies--
N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?--
Love in heart and tears in eyes;
Je vous en prie, pity me:
N'oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel--
N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?

It is hard to refrain from quoting half a dozen other pieces. There is the
courting of Phillis in _Perimedes the Blacksmith_ (1588), with its purely
idyllic close; or again the famous 'Shepherd's Wife's Song' from the
_Mourning Garment_ (1590):

Ah, what is love? It is a pretty thing,
As sweet unto a shepherd as a king;
And sweeter too,
For kings have cares that wait upon a crown,
And cares can make the sweetest love to frown:
Ah then, ah then,
If country loves such sweet desires do gain,
What lady would not love a shepherd swain?

No one not utterly callous to the pathos of human life, or warped by some
ethical twist beyond the semblance of a man, has ever been able to pass
unmoved by the figure of Robert Greene. We see him, the poet of all that
is truest and tenderest in human affection, abandoning his young wife and
child, drawn by the power of some fatal fascination into the whirlpool of
low life in London, and then, as if inspired by a sudden revelation of
objective vision, penning the throbbing lines of the forsaken mother's
song:

Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old there's grief enough for thee.

We see him again amid the despair and squalor of his death-bed, warning
his friends against his own example, and addressing to the wife he had not
seen for years those words endorsed on a bill for ten pounds, words ever
memorable in the history of English letters: 'Doll, I charge thee by the
love of our youth, and by my soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man
paid; for if he and his wife had not succoured me I had died in the
streets.' Such are the scenes of sordid misery which underlie some of the
choicest of English songs. It is best to return to the surface.

The lyric 'sequences' published towards the close of the sixteenth
century frequently contain more or less pastoral matter. Barnabe Barnes
appended some poems of this sort to his _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_ (c.
1593), among others a version of Moschus' idyl of runaway love, a theme
which had long been a favourite one with pastoral writers. Poliziano's
Latin translation of Moschus[127] was commended by E. K. in his notes to
the _Shepherd's Calender_, and the same original supplied Tasso with the
subject of his _Amore fuggitivo_, which served as epilogue to the
_Aminta_. William Smith's _Chloris_ (1596), except for plentiful swearing
by pastoral deities, is less bucolic in spite of its dedication to Colin
Clout. The most important of the sequences from our present point of view
is Nicholas Breton's _Passionate Shepherd,_ which was not published till
1604. It contains five pastorals in praise of Aglaia:

Had I got a kingly grace,
I would leave my kingly place
And in heart be truly glad
To become a country lad,
Hard to lie and go full bare,
And to feed on hungry fare,
So I might but live to be
Where I might but sit to see,
Once a day, or all day long,
The sweet subject of my song;
In Aglaia's only eyes
All my worldly paradise.

This is a fair specimen of Breton's dainty muse, but his choicest work
appeared in that wonderful anthology published in 1600 under the title of
_England's Helicon_. To this collection Breton contributed such verses as
the following:

On a hill there grows a flower--
Fair befall the dainty sweet!--
By that flower there is a bower,
Where the heavenly muses meet.

In that bower there is a chair,
Fringed all about with gold;
Where doth sit the fairest fair,
That ever eye did yet behold.

It is Phyllis fair and bright,
She that is the shepherd's joy;
She that Venus did despite,
And did bind her little boy.

Or again:

Good Muse, rock me asleep
With some sweet harmony;
The weary eye is not to keep
Thy wary company.

Sweet Love, begone awhile,
Thou knowest my heaviness;
Beauty is born but to beguile
My heart of happiness.

Another poem no less perfect has been already quoted at length. In its own
line, the delicate carving of fair images as in crystal or some precious
stone, Breton's work is unsurpassed. We cannot do better than take, as
examples of a very large class, some of the poems printed, in most cases
for the first time, in _England's Helicon_. Of Henry Constable, the poet
indicated doubtless by the initiais H. C., we have a charming song between
Phillis and Amaryllis, the counterpart and imitation of Spenser's
'Bonibell' ballad:

_P._ Fie on the sleights that men devise--
(Heigho, silly sleights!)
When simple maids they would entice.
(Maids are young men's chief delights.)
_A._ Nay, women they witch with their eyes--
(Eyes like beams of burning sun!)
And men once caught they do despise;
So are shepherds oft undone.

* * * * *

_P._ If every maid were like to me--
(Heigho, hard of heart!)
Both love and lovers scorn'd should be.
(Scorners shall be sure of smart.)
_A._ If every maid were of my mind--
(Heigho, heigho, lovely sweet!)
They to their lovers should prove kind;
Kindness is for maidens meet[128].

Of Sir John Wotton, the short-lived half-brother of the more famous Sir
Henry, there is a spirited song, betraying unusual command over a
complicated rhythm:

Jolly shepherd, shepherd on a hill,
On a hill so merrily,
On a hill so cheerily,
Fear not, shepherd, there to pipe thy fill;
Fill every dale, fill every plain;
Both sing and say, 'Love feels no pain.'

Another graceful poet of _England's Helicon_ is the 'Shepherd Tony,' whose
identity with Anthony Munday was finally established by Mr. Bullen. He
contributed, among other verses, a not very interesting reply to Harpelus'
complaint in 'Tottel's Miscellany,' and the well-known and exquisite:

Beauty sat bathing by a spring
Where fairest shades did hide her,

which reappears in his translation of the Castilian romance _Primelion_.

In Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd to his Love,' of which _England's
Helicon_ supplies one of three texts[129], we come to what is, with the
possible exception of _Lycidas_ alone, the most subtly modulated specimen
of pastoral verse in English. So far as internal evidence is concerned the
poem has absolutely nothing but its own perfection to connect it with the
name of Marlowe; it is utterly unlike all other verse, dramatic,
narrative, or lyric, ascribed to him. An admirable eclectic text, which
exhibits to the full the delicacy of the rhythm, has been prepared by Mr.
Bullen in his edition of Marlowe's works. It would be impossible not to
quote the piece in full:

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and vallies, dales and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined[130] slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.

The popularity of this poem was testified by its widespread influence on
the poets of the day. _England's Helicon_ contains 'the Nymphs reply,'
commonly attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, and also a long imitation;
Donne wrote a piscatory version, and Herrick paid it the sincerest form of
flattery, while less distinct reminiscences are common in the poetry of
the time. Yet Kit Marlowe's verses stand unrivalled.